Vasily Konstantin was more than eighty years old, but he was still a canny businessman. He took one look at Cyril and sat down without a word of dissent or concern. Not that Cyril would have tolerated either of those from him.
"You have questions."
Excellent, Vasily was getting straight to the point. "Yes. Why didn't you leave me in air force hands? You're not listed in my file, they had no reason to contact you."
Vasily frowned. "I'm your next of kin, Cyril."
"We hadn't spoken for over nine years when the accident happened. What changed that you felt the need to involve yourself in my life after I went into a coma?"
After a long silence, Vasily said, "Alexei is dead."
Cyril couldn't help it. He laughed. He laughed so loud and so long that he could barely sit up by the end of it. A nurse came in to check on them, but Cyril waved the man away as he tried to regain control of himself. Vasily just sat there, looking disapproving.
"Death is not a cause for such amusement," he chided.
"In this case, I think it is," Cyril replied. "Oh, it explains so much. Piotr is in jail and Alex is dead—let me guess, he died of an overdose in some hooker's bed?"
"Shot during a police raid of a dream den."
Cyril whistled, or tried to. He didn't quite have that level of coordination yet. "Alex moved from heroin to dreamsleep? He's lucky a bullet killed him before his brain shrunk to nothing. And what is the official story?"
"A congenital heart defect, of course," Vasily replied, as cool in the face of one son's idiotic death as he'd been in his disapproval of another's sexuality.
"Well." Cyril considered his brother's death and his father's strange new regard and figured out what was going on. "Ah, you're here to woo me for Konstantin International."
"I want the company to stay in family hands."
"Why would you want such a thing?" Cyril demanded. "I wasn't good enough before and your other two children were idiots who couldn't find their asses with both hands, yet you had no compunctions about handing things over to them. Why do you care that I control the company?"
"Our president has recently taken an interest in resurrecting a more Communist way of life," Vasily replied, his lip curling with disdain. "A new law states that any Russian business that isn't a family business must become a state business, boards of directors be damned."
Cyril gaped. "And you think Konstantin International qualifies as a family business? With the profits it pulls in?"
"Under the letter of the law, yes. And it will remain so, as long as you are set to take it over."
"You can't be serious."
"Why else would you be here in Moscow?" Vasily asked. "You said it yourself, my son. Why didn't I leave you to fade away in Walter Reed, where no one would monitor you and keep your body healthy and give you the latest lifesaving treatments? Why bother, when we have never been anything other than opposites?"
Cyril felt numb. "Because you need me."
"Precisely."
"What's to stop me from refusing to work for you? I won't stay out of a sense of gratitude." Gratitude was the farthest thing from Cyril's mind, even though he knew he probably wouldn't be alive any other way.
"Not gratitude, of course not. Do it for your friends."
"My… friends."
"In the ISA." Vasily folded his hands in his lap and looked smug. "Our company pays for a large part of their operating expenses. That money might be better allocated somewhere else, if I don't have assurance of your cooperation. Take your place as my heir, keep our company from falling into that red pig's hands, and I will continue to fund the mission to Mars."
Cyril stared at Vasily, who stared right back, calm and sure. "No," he said at last.
"What?"
"You won't cut funding to the ISA. They're one of the only sources of positive press that Konstantin gets, and you've signed a contract. You can't weasel out of an agreement with six different governments. Your threat is empty."
If anything, Vasily looked pleased. "You always were the smartest of my sons. There are things I can do though, Cyril, that are not bound by paper and ink. Consider carefully."
"I already have. My answer is still no. Why don't you go break your eldest out of prison, let him shoulder the company for a while?"
"Ah, his sentence was commuted to life after he murdered two other inmates," Vasily said regretfully. "You are my last hope, Cyril."
"Then you'll have to be hopeless."
"Perhaps," Vasily allowed. "For now."
The rapid melting of the polar ice caps in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries culminated in a dramatic change in climate all over the globe. Some of the greatest repercussions felt in North America were the dramatic chilling of southern Canada and the northern United States, and the equally dramatic warming of Alaska. In some of its southern locales temperatures reached as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit during the formerly frigid winter, and the changes wrought in the ecosystem have been fascinating and terrifying by degrees. –Introduction to "
A Modern Treatise on Alaska"
, (2
nd
Ed.)
Cyril went to Alaska.
He'd considered Siberia, but he didn't want to stay any longer in his father's country than he had to. He considered New Mexico, but the proximity to the project without any information would probably drive him mad. Every bit of news that came out about the mission was carefully vetted before it was given away to be as vague and positive as possible, and every candidate for service signed a contract that legally prevented them from reaching out to organizations or individuals on their own on pain of dismissal. Their official Evergreen Candidate Statuses were updated irregularly and with little detail, Cyril knew: he checked Scottie's at least twice a day. Family time was strictly monitored, as Cyril remembered from his outside vantage on the few mixing events allowed, and Cyril couldn't be considered anyone's family. He didn't even know at this point if he could be considered anyone's friend.
I was Scottie's friend.
God damn it, Cyril didn't want to think about Scottie, but in the quiet moments between putting his life back together, packing up and moving to a place even colder than Moscow, Scottie was the one who came to mind.
He'd spent his two weeks of leave in the hospital, next to Cyril. That meant something, it had to mean something. Cyril's military and personal email accounts were both erased, so there could have been messages in there from Scottie at one point, but Cyril would never know. Six months—no, seven now—was enough time to get over someone, though. They had been… Cyril wasn't sure what they'd been. Too close for some things, not close enough for others. He missed him. Cyril missed everything about the ISA, but he missed Scottie most of all.
Cyril refused to pine. After another month of physical therapy he left Moscow, then spent all of autumn settling into his new cabin in the remains of Alakanuk, a town that had lost the battle with the rising sea about ten years earlier. The place was technically unincorporated now, with only a few dozen of the original villagers left running a store, a gas station and charging ludicrous amounts for Wi-Fi. Cyril liked it there. It was a good place to be alone. To lick his wounds, so to speak, and he had a lot of wounds to cover.
He rebuilt the cabin's roof, tried his hand at making his own furniture (everything wobbled, but at least it didn't collapse) and he learned to fish. It was a good thing that his special forces training had included cold weather scenarios, because once Cyril was settled the first winter storm hit, and he was cut off from the rest of the world.
It was cold and gray in the little ghost town, and almost completely silent except for the sound of the wind and the occasional cracking of the ice that had frozen over the nearby Yukon River. Cyril did his prescribed exercises, kept the cabin secure and made himself fix at least one meal a day on the old gas stove. He read the books he'd thought to load onto his tablet, and mostly occupied himself with staying alive. It felt good, to be competent enough to do that. Like he wasn't a complete fuckup, even if he had managed to fall out of the Mars program.
The randomness, the unfairness of it all hollowed out a place in Cyril's soul over the many dark, monotonous days, so that by the time the ice began to break up in March (locals said it used to last until May, but the world was a much warmer place now) Cyril had gotten used to the emptiness. He could read his medical report without flinching. He listened to the audio recordings of the accident that his father had somehow obtained, just once, but once was enough to give him the cold comfort of knowing that Scottie had been frantic for him, desperate on his behalf. That had been real. Whatever was between them had been real.
When spring came to Alakanuk, so did Vasily. Cyril wasn't surprised. He knew his father well enough to be pretty sure—not completely sure, but nearly—that the old man had spent his winter politicking, trying to get the leverage to get Piotr released or, barring that, to change the laws of business. His arrival meant that he'd failed. Cyril tried not to let that please him too much.
Vasily came in a boat, straight over the Bering Sea. "Fewer questions asked that way," he said as explanation as he stood on Cyril's doorstep. One of his bodyguards hulked behind him, looking bored in his black furs. "Aren't you going to let me in?"
After a moment, Cyril nodded. "But your man stays outside."
"Fair enough. Yvgeny, I'll call you when we're ready to depart." The bodyguard nodded and headed back toward the sunken town, where Vasily's yacht was perfunctorily docked. Vasily came inside the little cabin, but he didn't look around. He didn't ask to sit either, which was just as well because Cyril had only made one chair.
"Come and work for me."
"No." It was a bare bones salvo, not designed to completely put the old man off. Despite himself Cyril was interested to find out what his father had to offer him this time.
"Come and run KIC's propulsion department, and I will let you double the amount of funding that goes into research, development and production for the VASIMR rockets, instead of the regrettable cuts that I've been forced to make."
Cyril narrowed his eyes. "What cuts?"
His father shrugged. "Without proper oversight, that portion of the company is too expensive to maintain. I've had to let scientists go, and in turn scaled back the production of the rockets. There are enough already made to support the ISA's current mission to Mars, as long as nothing goes wrong."
"What about the rockets you promised them for shuttle deliveries?" Cyril demanded.
"Oh, those were never written into the contract, my son. It was assumed I would provide them, but never made legally binding." Vasily smiled, pulling his skin tight around his skull. "They have other rockets that can deliver supplies. Not as fast, not as reliable, but they still exist."
"You do realize that a certain amount of expediency is key to the mission planning. It's key to everyone's survival, not just the people still here but the people who are already on Mars."
"Of course I do."
Cyril shouldn't have been surprised that his father was willing to be an indirect murderer to get his way. He wasn't surprised by that, actually. What surprised him was his own reluctance to refuse the offer. If this winter had taught Cyril anything, it was that he still had too much room in his heart for longing.
As if reading his mind, Vasily said, "In this position, you would also be Konstantin's liaison with the ISA. You would get access to their equipment, their training facilities, even their people. Your former people, my son. Wouldn't you like to see them again?"
Wouldn't he? Was there anything Cyril wanted more? It would hurt to be so close to something that he was no longer a part of, but the pain would be worth it if he could see Scottie again, even if it was only at arm's length. "I accept."
Vasily smiled. "I thought you would."
There's been a transfer of power in one of Russia's most powerful companies, as Vasily Konstantin makes room for his youngest son, former ISA Project Evergreen candidate Cyril Konstantin, to take over as head of Konstantin International Corporation. After years of apparent estrangement, the two were brought back together after an ill-fated training exercise left Cyril Konstantin in a lengthy coma. Sources close to the pair claim that the father-son bonding is more about company power than familial affection, but either way, President Federov is likely fuming back in Moscow, where the law dictates that control of Vasily's company may pass to his son, and not the state, on the elder Konstantin's eventual death. –Hong Kong Business Times, April 3
rd
, 2070.
Cyril had never intended for it to take another year for him to work his way to Los Alamos, but his father hadn't been exaggerating when he'd spoken about changes to VASIMR production. It had taken some quick thinking, generous rehires and a lot of work to catch the rocket program back up to where it needed to be, and Cyril had been run ragged by the time he'd actually accomplished that. He was also heavily invested in the success of the company at that point, and he didn't even have to be on the same continent as his father to know the old man was laughing at him, and at his own cleverness.
It didn't matter. After nearly two years apart, Cyril was about to see Scottie again. It had taken some finagling, since the ISA was still rabidly protective of all their specialists' time, but eventually Cyril got his way. It helped that he got to meet with Sophie first, who was ostensibly seeing him to talk about potentially harmful fallout from the rockets, but in actuality—
"You arsehole!" she shouted, punching him in the shoulder with her tiny fist as soon as the door slid shut behind her. Cyril rubbed his arm with a wounded expression. "Oh, don't look at me like that! How could you let us think you were dead? We didn't even find out you'd recovered until Mona mentioned an article in some damn Chinese newspaper! You didn't answer any of Scott's emails, do you have any idea what it did to him, the thought of you lying there in a coma until you wasted away?"